Sunday, June 23, 2013

Rubbertack is Back

One
thing that’s been lost on my current blog and Tumblr is that my
Zentradi obsession started with seeing the Robotech dub in 2008, and
that a couple years ago, I spent my time tearing way through every old,
forgotten Robotech novel and comic I could find. I still like some parts
of those, hate others (especially the lack of good original characters
and the suggestion that the Zentradi/human alliance was
self-destructive), and overall would say that I don’t hate Robotech as a
concept and a franchise.

However,
I quickly understood that continuing Robotech past the 1990s wasn’t
going to go anywhere storywise. The legal restrictions were much
tighter, with the new sequel comics killing off every old character they
could, and releases of new material getting more and more sporadic. The Shadow Chronicles,
the animated film from that era, apparently took forever to make but
was still boring crap, and the long-questioned sequel failed to
materialize.

Recently,
it’s been said that Robotech will finally...uh...be...moving ahead with
“Love, Live Alive”. The original “Love, Live, Alive” was a sequel OVA
to Genesis Climber Mospeda,
the anime that was dubbed into the third part of Robotech. It mostly
consisted of animated music videos, with a tiny amount of original
footage.

Yet
the trailer shows new footage from the “Shadows” universe that is the
new Robotech, which is probably exciting to the small core of die-hard
fans that have been waiting to see the Shadows universe continued, and
this will probably supplement the short animation from the original LLA.
Hey, guys, knock yourselves out.

But
I just couldn’t keep going with this, and I can’t get back into that
fold. I know that nothing will really change with this franchise. It’ll
always keep scrabbling in its current rut.

Part
of me thinks that modern Robotech would be inherently doomed no matter
what talent was behind it, since a good story usually would tie up all
its loose ends, deal decently with all its characters and its plot
points, and Robotech can’t even manage that because it doesn’t have
access to these things. Dancing around the characters or setting the
story in the far-flung future wouldn’t be solving this problem, but
avoiding the issue. It’s a trap.

Yet
I don’t want to let the writers off the hook that easily. It still
might have been possible to create something decent and fulfilling
despite the legal restraints, but it looked like Tommy Yune and everyone
else didn’t even try. The minds behind Robotech in the 21st century
just keep promoting the same junk over and over again, going to cons
with all the other active companies to pretend they are actually doing
something.

Meanwhile,
Harmony Gold spends money and makes empty promises, with the only
things to show for it being some sporadic toy and RPG manual releases, a
few comics, and one extremely boring movie. All of it sucks, can’t even
be enjoyed on an emotional level.

It
was painful and pathetic to watch, and after a while I stopped feeling
hurt by it. I also stopped feeling sorry for the fans who still believed
Robotech would make something of itself. After all that had happened,
anyone should have been able to see the writing on the wall. The
franchise is dead, but somebody’s still dangling its corpse on
marionette strings.

As
to the prospect of a live-action Robotech movie, well, that’s also a
nigh-impossibility. Asking it to be one forgets that, unlike other
popular eighties cartoons, Robotech wasn’t made as a single work by a
single company, but three separate anime redubbed to be one series. That
makes it harder to adapt than, say, Transformers. I wish people would
remember that.